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Sunday, June 13, 2010

Atheist, Pervert, Pluralist

Upgraded from my exchange with Jim in the Moot:

Jim wrote: For [C.S.] Lewis, this [anti-materialist] line of argument is simply a way to keep God in the picture.

There's a whole lot of that going on, in my experience.

My own position is rather idiosyncratic because I am a crusty atheist and champion of consensus science on the one hand, but a pluralist about reasonableness on the other, in that I think different criteria warrant as reasonable our judgments about scientific, legal, aesthetic, moral, ethical, political, even more circumscribed professional questions.

Sometimes I sympathize more with the arguments of religious folks (of whom I am not one) against atheists (of whom I am one) who want to be too imperializing about reducing all endeavor and value into terms they fancy to be properly scientific -- a project that seems to me to have nothing to do with science (let alone atheism), properly so-called.

While I don't believe in God I do follow a path of perverse private perfections exploring and appreciating the delights of the world or the pursuit of my own thoughts in ways that are far from entirely justified by the terms that justify and warrant (and rightly so) our beliefs in respect to consensus science where matters of prediction and control are concerned. A reasonable person is not only capacitated but capacious, and this is all good.

When a materialist declares a pragmatist to be relativist you can be sure he is revealing that his is a fundamentalist rather than properly scientific materialism. When a naturalist declares pluralism supernatural you can be sure he is revealing that his science has been commandeered by a reductionist project that has nothing to do with science properly so-called.

On the other hand, I do wish that those who complain about materialism or naturalism or science and then always freight these terms with words like "merely," "simply," "random" and so on [as many do in the examples Jim provides in his exposition in the Moot --d] would be much clearer that it is reductionism and scientism that they really oppose. Opposing these leaves plenty of reasonable conceptions of consensus science, materialism, naturalism cheerfully intact -- and it provides nothing I can see to reassure the faithful in their beliefs in a creator-god or guardian angel or eternal life or a superhuman judge punishing the wicked and rewarding the well-meaning after life as too rarely happens, demoralizingly enough, here on earth.

1 comment:

> When a materialist declares a pragmatist to be relativist> you can be sure he is revealing that his is a fundamentalist> rather than properly scientific materialism. When a naturalist> declares pluralism supernatural you can be sure he is> revealing that his science has been commandeered by a> reductionist project that has nothing to do with science> properly so-called.

Yes, well, you remember what William James said about thatsort of thing.

"The history of philosophy is to a great extentthat of a certain clash of human temperaments. . .Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason,so [a philosopher] urges impersonalreasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperamentreally gives him a stronger bias than any of hismore strictly objective premises. . . He trusts histemperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, hebelieves in any representation of the universe that doessuit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of keywith the world's character, . . . incompetent and'not in it,' in the philosophic business. . .

Now the particular difference of temperament thatI have in mind. . . is onethat has counted in literature, art, government,and manners as well as in philosophy. In mannerswe find formalists and free-and-easy persons.In government, authoritarians and anarchists. Inliterature, purists or academicals, and realists.In art, classics and romantics. . . [I]n philosophy wehave a very similar contrast expressed in the pairof terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,''empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in alltheir crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning yourdevotee to abstract and eternal principles. No onecan live an hour without both facts and principles,so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet itbreeds antipathies of the most pungent characterbetween those who lay the emphasis differently. . ."

"The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!I read in an old letter -- from a gifted friend who died tooyoung -- these words: 'In everything, in science, art, moralsand religion, there must be one system that is right andevery other wrong.' How characteristic of the enthusiasmof a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such achallenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs tomost of us even later that the question 'what is the truth?' isno real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and thatthe whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from thefact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phraselike the Latin Language or the Law."